Loss: After Viacom got YouTube to remove its videos and signed a deal with Joost.com, Viacom announced yesterday that its video views and profits were up:

“Video streaming traffic on our sites has increased dramatically, an important validation of our strategy,” said Philippe Dauman, president and chief executive of Viacom, owned by media mogul Sumner Redstone.

Traffic to Comedy Central’s website was up more than 90 per cent, MTV.com had increased by more than 50 per cent and Nickelodeon had seen more than 30 per cent more traffic in the past month, Viacom said.

The media group, which released fourth-quarter results on Thursday, said quarterly profit nearly quadrupled to $480m, partly reflecting the acquisition of the DreamWorks film studio.

(From the Financial Times.)

Today, CBS spurned YouTube for its online user-generated video content, going with CSTV instead (check it out on MarketingVox). The college sports network will be teaming up with CBS for a March-Madness-themed UGC contest (though I can’t imagine anyone would want to watch the NCAAs when you just know Duke won’t win. So sad. ).

Roger Kay, principal analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates, says of the CBS/CSTV deal: “It’s about narrowcasting—getting a more finely grained view of your audience and being able to cater to them more specifically is now more attractive.”

Apparently CBS officials don’t read CNNMoney.com. Yesterday’s commentary, entitled “Wake up, media! YouTube is not the enemy!“, counseled big media corporations that they shouldn’t fear YouTube, but embrace it. From the article:

It’s seems appropriate (seeing that I am in Australia) that I mention news that the Australian state of Victoria has banned YouTube in its schools.

Victoria, Australia’s second most populous state, has banned the popular video-sharing site from its 1,600 government schools after a gang of male school students videotaped their degrading assault on a 17-year-old girl on the outskirts of the state capital of Melbourne.

It seems to me, they should have banned YouTube in schools anyway – it’s hardly a resource school kids need to access, is it?

“Kids, today, we’re going to learn about the evolution of dance. You will be tested!”

A pingback from BlackHatSEO.no on yesterday’s post about YouTube infiltrating Google SERPs brought up an interesting point that I hadn’t considered.

What, you can’t read Norwegian? Okay, neither can I. But I’ll attempt to paraphrase:

Jordan McCollum from Marketing Pilgrim has an interesting post on how YouTube is beginning to creep up the SERPs. There’s some potential here—if your site is stuck in “Google’s Sandbox” you can generate a strategic video, optimize YouTube for on-site search [I think] and drive video traffic from YouTube to your site.

Now there’s one way to use YouTube to really help with your online marketing: but easier said than done. The “shoes” video apparently ranks because it’s a viral hit, and is probably most popular for its shock value and oddball humor. Can you imagine how it would change your perception of the brand if the video featured the words “ManoloBlahnik.com”? (That’s an upscale women’s shoe brand, whose shoes may well cost $300 or more. Let’s get ‘em.)

SERoundtable and Mashable are up in arms as YouTube videos have begun creeping up the SERPs. SERountable points out the #2 results for “shoes” right now is a YouTube video:

In one comment on SER, the YouTube video is called a legitimate result because it has backlinks.

Granted, it’s a popular video—12M+ views (though I now wish I could take mine back), 10K comments, 61K favorited. Yahoo Site Explorer finds 3000 links to it, including one from the Wikipedia entry on shoes (it’s no longer there and the page has been vandalized so many times that I can’t tell which iteration of the page actually featured the link, if ever). The word “shoes” does appear 35 times in the code of the YouTube page. And of course, it’s repeated a lot in the movie.

The San Jose Mercury News is reporting Google has signed a deal with Audible Magic to screen uploaded videos for copyrighted content. Just days after Google’s Eric Schmidt confirmed YouTube would roll out anti-piracy measures – which we all assumed would be something developed internally – we learn that the video sharing site will partner with the very same company MySpace partnered with last week.

The big question now is whether YouTube can maintain its popularity, once it starts screening for copyrighted content. Could YouTube become the next Napster – immensely popular while unregulated, but now just a shadow of its former self?

YouTube is “definitely going to lose popularity,” said Jesse Drew, acting director of the technocultural studies program at University of California-Davis. “These things become popular because they are underground and free and accessible.”